We know. You spent a lot of time and money designing your website. It’s branded, it’s got great content, it’s got a nice logo. Google’s “Mobile-Friendly Test” doesn’t care.
If you head on over to the tool, be warned: your feelings might get hurt. The Mobile-Friendly Test is basically an automatic complaint generator: “Text too small to read,” “links too close together,” “content wider than screen.”
Google’s plan is to start making these complaints heard on April 21. At that point, websites that aren’t mobile-friendly are going to take a nosedive in mobile search results.
At Movable Ink, we couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if this applied to email marketing. Google’s Gmail has over 500 million users worldwide, but 42% of marketers “rarely or never” create responsive emails.
More Mobile, More Problems
Imagine a world where Google decided to put every email that wasn’t optimized for mobile into Spam. If more than 500 million people suddenly stopped getting your emails because they weren’t responsive, that would be kind of detrimental to your marketing , right?
The thing is that Google doesn’t have to bother. People are filtering emails that aren’t optimized for mobile all by themselves. Three-quarters of smartphone users say that if they can’t read an email on their phones, they’ll delete it.
And what will an email that isn’t responsive look like on an Apple Watch? Or a connected TV or a smart refrigerator?
Responsive emails aren’t just a nice-to-have. As the competition starts creating emails that don’t just respond to screen size but to customer context, static emails that aren’t designed for mobile will end up in the Trash folder without Google’s help.
The Mobile, Multichannel World
Last week, we talked about how the Apple Watch is marketing’s chance to redefine responsive emails.
Google’s April deadline for sites to go mobile or go home – or risk getting what we can only imagine is going to be a severe SEO pummeling – is another reminder that, whether a brand wants to invest in them or not, your customers are already looking for mobile-friendly channels.
That’s just the beginning.
As companies get more sophisticated with big data analytics and real-time data, it will be possible to take responsive emails to the next level by taking into account contextual data like location, weather, time of open, and more. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test might hurt your feelings, but a customer’s mobile-friendly test will hurt your sales.
Want to learn how context can help brands take responsive emails to the next level?